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The Worst Reads of 2018

2018 was not the best year for me. In fact 2018, for the most part sucked on a lot of levels. Although, the silver lining of 2018 was that I got to read a lot of books. The year before last, 2017, I wrote a summary of my reading focusing on the variety of authors and publishing mediums. In 2018, I read a grand total of 86 books from a variety of authors and languages all over the globe. Rather than doing a repeat of my 2017 report, I thought I would look at the best and worst of 2018 because there were some stellar books and some real shockers!

Now, I know you are all here for the tea, so lets get straight into the worst books I read in 2018.

Drum role please…

The Seven Sisters by Lucinda Riley was a bit of a shocker if I must say. This book has a 4.21 star average on Goodreads and frankly, I don’t know what Coolaid every is drinking because this book sucked. Flat characters and a cliche story lines galore. There is a boatload of sexism and I don’t even know where to begin to pull apart the adoption narrative that implies that people who are adopted need to go and find their ‘real’ families. This book was disappointing and at over 500 pages, too long. To quote a certain pop song, “Thank you, Next”.

You’re probably wondering why I read the second book, The Storm Sister, in this series, which has a 4.31 star average on Goodreads if I hated the first one so much. Well, to answer you: I frankly don’t know why. I hate read this book. This book made me want to throw things. With gems like:

“You know how I loathe women with were a lot of make up…”

AND

“To be frank, from what I’d heard about you, I’d been expecting some muscly “he-she”. And then you turned up, all blue eyes and gorgeous Titian hair, and completely disarmed me.”

you might wonder what could be the problem?! I mean, what a compliment! Truly though, my actual favourite quote from the novel is:

“But it’s much cleaner, don’t you think? Sharing one name? Just for bank accounts and also saves explanations during telephone calls with electricians and plumbers and…”

If you’re can’t figure out why I hated this book, I cannot help you.

The Sellout by Paul Beatty was the Man Booker Prize winner of 2016. Its 3.77 star rating on Goodreads is a testament to how polarising it is for readers. I wanted to like this book. I bought this book in the hopes I would, yet it was awful. I finished it more out of duty and the fact that I’m no quitter! I talked about this book with a few friends and several of all felt the same way, that the book was too masculine. It felt at many times throughout the novel navel gazing and weird and I genuinely couldn’t get interested in any of the characters. It was just, meh.

The Warden by Anthony Trollope is the first in his series “The Chronicles of Barsetshire”. His novel, The Way We Live Now is a favourite of mine and I have already talked about that novel here. This novel though was horrible. It is rather short in comparison to Trollope’s other works, yet it is boring and dull. He also constantly refers to the reader which irritated me. I have the second book in the series and I feel like I might try to read it this year, although I feel a little bit burnt from horrible literary series (See Worst books 1 and 2).

I took The Testament of Loki on holidays with me recently, hoping it would be as good as Joanne M. Harris’ previous novel The Gospel of Loki. This book was not. I think because I enjoyed her first book so much this one felt like such a let down. This is honestly a weird mash-up of Stephen King’s “The Dark Tower” series, Neil Gaiman’s American Gods and that horrible book/movie Ready Player One. The plot felt predictable and a bit been-there-done-that. Even though I got to read it in the sunshine on a beautiful beach in La Palma, nothing could save it.

There were many other books that were frustrating or just okay in 2018, but these five books were at the top of my list for the aforementioned reasons.

So tell me, what books did you hate on in 2018? As always, share the reading love.